Abstract
Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, this article details how racial minority girls, and those around them, affectively respond to and resist racialization and different forms of racist aggression online. The material draws on a larger netnographic study of young teens on a public social media platform in Sweden and demonstrates how these girls, as well as their racialized peers, are ‘othered’ through direct, indirect and repeated aggression. I explore how instances of resistance work in various ways to reject, re-appropriate and renegotiate racist assemblages where differing racialized figures are affectively produced and enforced in direct and indirect ways in online interaction. Through this, the study contributes to knowledge on girls’ resistance to racialized aggression online, as well as how racism works affectively in youths’ everyday online interaction.
Introduction
Similar to other Western contexts, racial minority youth in Sweden experience different and multiple forms of racism which permeate their various everyday life venues (Jonsson, 2019). This occurs despite the Swedish welfare state’s self-image as anti-racist and Swedish society as ‘post-racial’ (Jonsson, 2019; see also Titley, 2019). As social media and internet usage has become a ubiquitous feature and a social necessity for most youth, everyday forms of racism have passed over to their everyday online contexts as well (Swedish Media Council, 2019). Although internet usage can offer racialized youth opportunities for organization in separatist ‘safe spaces’ (Idevall, 2015; Pérez-Aronsson, 2019), many online spaces, including those most used by youth, are wrought with bigoted and misogynistic practices (Back, 2002a). In fact, surveys suggest that online harassment on the basis of ethnicity, religion and country of origin has increased in Sweden in recent years, and that these practices are particularly affecting girls (Swedish Media Council, 2019). There is a fair amount of research on youths’ experiences of racism in schools (Basile, 2020; Mac an Ghaill, 1988; Nayak, 1999), including in Sweden (Jonsson, 2007, 2019; León Rosales & Jonsson, 2019), but a paucity of studies on their experiences of and responses to everyday racism on social media (cf. Carney, 2016). Drawing on a larger study conducted on a popular social media platform among youth in Sweden, this article contributes to this literature by exploring the affectivity of racialized online assemblages by studying racial minority girls’ exposure and resistance to racist aggression online.
Within youth cultural studies, resistance has generally been understood as individual and collective acts towards a dominant culture or system (Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1977). Drawing on a Deleuze–Guattarian approach to affect theory, I theorize resistance as a relational process of becoming, produced through the entanglement of the actions of human users, online technologies and materialities (Alldred & Fox, 2017). In particular, I am interested in instances of conflict, or noticeable friction, where bodies, objects, discourses, symbols and online affordances are affectively circulated in such a way that racial minority youth are made ‘bodies out of place’, including on their own profiles on social media (Tate, 2014), thus positioning them as ‘outsiders within’ (Collins, 2013). In this way, the article not only sheds light on the overlooked issue of young people’s exposure to racism online but also sheds light on the affective modalities and forms of digital racist assemblages (Titley, 2019).
I will begin by developing on the gendered racialization of minority girls (Collins, 2013), how resistance has been understood in previous research and how resistance can be framed through an affect theoretical Deleuzian–Guattarian lens. I will then explore instances of racist aggression against differently racialized girls on a public social media platform and demonstrate how racialized minority youth, and girls in particular, reject policing to produce new racialized assemblages and subjectivities.
Gendered Racialization, Racism and Youth Resistance
The term ‘racialization’ was first introduced within the Swedish context by Molina (1997) to understand the racial coding and social segregation of urban areas. The term has later been applied to describe the continual and contingent process by which someone is ‘marked’ and thus ascribed race, particularly as ‘non-white’ (Swe: rasifieras som icke-vit). The nominalization ‘racialized’ (Swe: rasifierad) has become popularized within the Swedish context and widely appropriated by racially marginalized people as a means of challenging whiteness in everyday speech (Hübinette, 2011; Jonsson, 2019). The process of racialization is closely intertwined with the use of language, names, clothing and religious symbols (Back, 2002b; Mac an Ghaill, 1988; Nayak, 1999). Research concerning youth in the Swedish context has highlighted how racialized practices are gendered, for instance, how white femininity is produced in relation to ideas about the ‘other’, often understood through stereotypic sexualized, gendered and racialized figures, such as ‘cocky immigrant girls’ (Ambjörnsson, 2004) and ‘immigrant whores’ (Sylwander & Gottzén, 2020). These not only serve to uphold specific ideas of white Swedish femininity (and masculinity), but also render whiteness an invisible norm as white skin becomes the ‘unmarked marker’ of difference (Ambjörnsson, 2004). Further, such stereotypes become conflated with normative breaches as ‘un-Swedish’, thereby warranting ethnic majority adults’ and youths’ constant ‘educating’ of racialized minority youth in ‘Swedish’ norms and values (Jonsson, 2007). Notions of ‘good’ ‘Swedish-ness’ are juxtaposed against notions of threatening ‘immigrant-ness’ so that racialized youths’ bodies are seen as norm breaking, threatening and less desirable (Ambjörnsson, 2004). Various feminized objects and practices are tied to negative public perceptions and sentiments towards non-Western culture. Here, the hijab and other forms of headscarves are especially marked symbols, as girls and women that wear headscarves report that they regularly experience Islamophobic racism in various public settings (Jakku & Waara, 2017; Listerborn, 2015; Wagner et al., 2012). Differently racialized girls are thus ‘marked’ differently, from one another, and in varying ways in different contexts. Objects such as the hijab and epithets such as ‘kickers’ exemplify these differences, particularly how expectations of femininity intersect with conceptions of race, class and sexuality.
Racist and misogynist sentiment are also present online (Nakamura, 2007) and affordances in online spaces ‘accelerate and amplify circulation in ways that have transformed the extent and reach of abusive communications’ (Titley, 2019). For instance, racist aggression is known to be particularly pervasive on platforms and applications where users have the possibility to post anonymously (Back, 2002a; Gin et al., 2016; Sylwander, 2019). On these platforms and applications, the use of racial slurs, hate speech, threat of physical aggression towards racialized people or ‘immigrants’ are common (Gin et al., 2016). The circulation and intensification of affective investment that occurs in online exchanges thus drive and shape digital modalities of racist expression (Paasonen, 2015; Titley, 2019).
Social media is nonetheless also an important arena for minority youth to create their own spaces for communication and socializing with each other, to discuss their life experiences, particularly their experiences of racism and to collectively resist whiteness (Idevall, 2015; Pérez-Aronsson, 2019). Social media has also been the site for youth to engage in larger political anti-racist activism, such as in the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Carney, 2016). However, there is a glaring lack of studies that explore young people’s, and girls’ more specifically, negotiations with and resistance to racist practices in their everyday online contexts, both internationally and in the Swedish context.
Resistance has a long history in youth culture studies, where it was first linked to working-class youth whose subcultural expressions and practices were identified as opposition to a hegemonic class structure within a drastically changing post-industrial society (Johansson & Lalander, 2012). Early work within youth culture studies either approached resistance as deviance or as appropriation (Raby, 2005). Willis’ (1977) seminal ethnographic work identified certain defiant or deviant behaviour of working-class boys in a school in England as resistance strategies to middle-class school norms. Hebdige (1979), on the other hand, studied British youth subcultures appropriation of semiotic material practices of resistance, through expressions of style and music. In his semiotic Gramscian framework, clothing, pins and hairstyles were seen as forms of material subversion, and the appropriation of black working-class music such as reggae was identified as resistance to mainstream, adult, white middle-class culture and capitalist structure (McRobbie, 2005). These early works imbued their youth subjects with the agency to engage in social resistance and ability to ascribe cultural meaning to practices and material objects (Raby, 2005; Saukko, 2011). Early on, the feminist youth cultural theorist McRobbie noted the absence of girls from classic subcultural ethnographic studies and illustrated how these studies tended to depict girls in stereotypical and marginalizing ways, positioning them largely outside of the production of meaningful cultural resistance (McRobbie, 1977, 1991). Furthermore, Gilroy (1987) argued that these class-based analyses often failed to include race and racism as central parameters in their view of power and oppression. Since the 1990s, youth culture scholars have turned towards post-structural, post-Marxist and post-subcultural approaches that adopted a more ‘fragmented and process-oriented understanding’ of resistance than previously (Johansson & Lalander, 2012, p. 1082) and incorporated new ways of attending to materialism, by exploring how class, ethnicity and gender intersect through complex social processes (Johansson & Lalander, 2012; Raby, 2005; Saukko, 2011).
This intersectional approach has largely framed studies of resistance to racism and racist aggression, which are identified in everything from micro-resistance in everyday encounters to collectively organized political action. Basile (2020) posits that ‘[a]cts of resistance are oppositional in nature, but not all oppositional actions are acts of resistance’ (p. 99). Resistance may also take non-confrontational approaches, such as withdrawing. ‘Racial battle fatigue’ is known to result in various stress responses such as anger and physical violence, but also include less overt responses such as exhaustion, as well as psychological and emotional withdrawal (Smith et al., 2007). Further, resistance has been framed as a form of resilience to the pressures of hegemonic whiteness, such as indigenous or minority groups resistance to ‘cultural assault’ by for instance ‘valorizing’ their language and culture (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999), as well as individual opposition to racialized stereotypes (Carter, 2008). In a Canadian study, not fighting back was also a way for African-Canadian youth to counter the stereotype that dictates that they would respond to racial aggression with violence (Kubiliene et al., 2015). The youth in Pérez-Aronsson’s (2019) study described various strategies that they had undertaken to handle the structural, overt and subtle forms of racism that they experienced in school, by, for instance, ‘picking their fights’, becoming active in separatist organizations to find support, and also by using online forums to ‘rant’. Titley (2019) points to the ways that the intense circulation of online communication contributes to ‘mobilizing public sentiment and resonance’ which is linked to an accelerated ‘hyper-responsiveness’ producing specific forms of anti-racist action online. Even though there is limited research that explores the ways in which youths’ online activities are raced (boyd, 2011b; Hargittai, 2007), there is an apparent lack of research that has looked at how racialized youth, and girls in particular, respond to racism in their everyday online spaces and practices.
In this article, I take an affect theory approach to resistance, as it takes into account the various material and affective relations that are at play in instances of racist aggression. This approach differs from early youth culture studies in that it deprivileges economy as the decisive material force determining social relations. Further, it deprivileges the dualities between social/cultural, body/mind, language/materiality, macro/micro, power/resistance and structure/agency (Alldred & Fox, 2017; see also Raby, 2005). Instead, resistance can be studied by attending to the relations at play within racialized events, which include human and non-human materialities. I see resistance as something relational, situated and material (Alldred & Fox, 2017; Fox & Alldred, 2015), a constant process of becoming, produced through the entanglement of the actions of human users, online technologies and materialities. If one follows the idea that affect is the body’s capacity and potential to affect and be affected (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), it is possible to theorize resistance as a form of ‘enhancement’ of the body’s capacity within a given assemblage (Alldred & Fox, 2017). This enhancement can then work to increase the body’s capacity to act and feel, and to inhabit new, previously unimagined, subjectivities. Through this ontology, power and resistance are seen as ‘transient’ and ‘fluctuating’ and produced through the continued repetition of ‘particular affects between assembled relations’ (Alldred & Fox, 2017, p. 1173). Things, bodies, notions, ideas and discourse are thus assembled relationalities that interact in ways that produce specific capacities in bodies to act. Racialization can, therefore, be understood as a process within assemblages that territorialize bodies, things, ideas and discourse in specific ways, thereby specifying their particular capacities or relations (Alldred & Fox, 2017; Weheliye, 2014). These bodily orientations and bodies’ capacities to affect other bodies in a space (online or offline) are historied (Ahmed, 2001). Race, from this perspective, becomes about what is within reach or the affective possibilities of bodies within a space (the capacity to affect and be affected). Resistance, consequently, could be seen as attempts to de-territorialize the racialized assemblage. Such a process can produce ‘lines of flight’ whereby relationalities within the assemblage change, producing new assemblages and, potentially, new subjectivities as bodies’ capacities become enhanced (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). For instance, the way in which a young body may be seen to rebel against a dominant culture and, at the same time, conform to a peer group culture (Raby, 2005). I will, therefore, explore how different materialities, ideas, discourses and bodies work affectively to territorialize, deterritorialize and reterritorialize the online assemblages of which these girls are part.
Methodology
The empirical material of this study is drawn from a larger non-interventionist netnographic project (Kozinets, 2015). The project includes the profiles of 150 young social media users aged 11–15 years, on a popular social networking site (SNS) among teens in Sweden. The site was an open SNS, thus all profiles were publicly accessible. Girls in Sweden are more active on social media than boys (Swedish Media Council, 2019), 1 the ethnographic material included more girls (95) than boys (53) and only two youth that identified as non-binary. Among these, 42 (28%) identified as ‘immigrants’ or as being of mixed heritage (Swedish: ‘halvsvensk’) for instance having one parent from Sweden and one from another country, or being first- or second-generation immigrant. 2 All the youth in the netnographic study were interconnected on the social media platform and most came from a medium-sized Swedish town, the population of which reflects the demographic makeup of Sweden in general. 3 The main site for the netnographic study was the time-lines of the youths’ profiles, where they themselves uploaded content, but this was also the site where peers and others could write public messages to them. Users had the possibility to be anonymous. Users could also send direct messages to each other, at times users would post screen grabs of these messages or discuss their content, other than that these were not accessible for analysis. The users shared content via text, by sharing links to content and other websites, sharing screen grabs, posting self-produced videos and images, and using emojis. Profiles were interconnected by way of hyperlinking, as well as by way of pseudonymous referencing, this allowed me to follow interaction across users’ profiles and to ascertain how users were interconnected. This project has received approval from the Regional Ethical Review Board in Stockholm 4 and adopts a non-interventionist and harm reduction approach, whereby: the SNS is not named; all excerpts have been masked, so as not to contain identifiable biographical data; and excerpts have been translated from Swedish to English, so as not to be searchable.
The empirical material was coded in three steps using the data analysis software NVivo11. The first step of coding meant using a list of code words that were identified throughout the ethnographic field work, as signalling racialized aggression or contestation. These words included but were not limited to: ‘blatte’; ‘babbe’; ‘svartskalle’ (‘svart*’) 5 ;‘muslim’; ‘rasism’/‘rasist’ (‘ras*’); ‘invandrare’ (Eng: immigrant); SD (Swedish Democrats, Swe: Sverigedemokraterna); ‘orre’ (‘orr*’); ‘svenska’(Eng: Swedish); ‘orten’ (Eng: the hood); ‘arab’. I then identified and coded further contentious interactions based on these word searches. Thereafter, a second level of coding was conducted to map interconnected interactions and events. Hyperlinked handles facilitated mobility among users. This allowed me to identify and map certain racialized events on several profiles and then further code them thereafter. The secondary mapping and coding process allowed me to follow certain cases in more depth and detail, allowing me to map the assemblages through the exchanges between users. Finally, the empirical material that makes up this study was mainly found on the profiles of a number of differently racialized girls. The reason being that girls were more active and were more often the targets of racialized aggression, as compared to boys.
The analysis is divided into three themes that reflect different ways that resistance was practised and flowed in these racialized online assemblages. Although these themes reflect findings in the larger corpus, I primarily focus on three cases to illustrate them more in depth. These are: (1) the material resistance of ‘blattesvenska’ (English: ‘immigrant Swedish’); (2) racialized aggression and messy online resistance and (3) resistance against racialized and religious shaming.
The Material Resistance of ‘Blattesvenska’ 4
To a certain extent, SNSs allow users to mould identities, as they write themselves into being through a continuous process of becoming (boyd, 2011a). This process of online becoming is not, however, innocent; it is directed by algorithms, broader online cultures and users’ specific contextual cultures. In this particular online space, minority youth did not seem to be able to pass unmarked; rather, they were made ‘bodies out of place’ through a set of recurring practices of racialization. On the other hand, youth with ethnic majority sounding names and looks were not asked about their heritage, thus distinctly placing them as an invisible norm, racialized and immigrant youth were made visible and out of place. Racializing practices seemed to intensify around different materialities, discourse and practices that were coded as raced, such as ‘immigrant Swedish’. Muslim symbols (particularly the hijab) and certain behaviour were often coded as un-Swedish if it emanated from a racialized user. These were then tied to negative racialized, mostly, female figures such as the ‘bad Muslim girl’, the ‘Chinese whore’, the ‘qhaba’ (‘whore’), ‘orre’ (‘whore’) or the ‘bad immigrant’. They were in turn attached to minority girls, who were also recurrently asked whether or not they were Muslim and asked about their country of origin. Such repeated questioning in itself impinges on the possible capacities of racialized bodies in a given space and lays the ‘foundation for repeated exercises of power’ and racism (Alldred & Fox, 2017, p. 1166).
The use of ‘immigrant Swedish’ was prominent in minority youths’ online communication, drawing on Arabic words such as ‘wallah’ (‘I swear to God’), ‘stukfurrulah’ 3 (‘shame’) and ‘qhaba’ (‘whore’). This appropriation of words coded as ‘immigrant Swedish’ worked to signal the girls’ awareness of their otheredness, to draw them closer together by overtly identifying as racialized or ‘immigrant’, and rejecting the whiteness of ‘proper Swedish’. They also explicitly rejected a particular form of white Swedish-ness, situating it as something boring and stiff by employing derogatory terms such as ‘svennighet’ (‘Swedishness’) and ’svennar’ (‘Swedes’).
But ‘immigrant Swedish’ was also the focus of much racialized aggression. For instance, Shari, a girl of Middle Eastern descent, was the constant target of harassing and schooling comments about her use of ‘immigrant Swedish’. These racialized events triggered various reactions by Shari herself, as well as her peers and anonymous others. The policing of her use of certain words was tied to the notion that she should want to conform to the Swedish society and speak ‘proper Swedish’. Users wrote things like ‘You live in Sweden but you don’t want to learn Swedish’, telling her to ‘LEARN SWEDISH’ and calling her ‘pathetic’ for using certain words and phrases like ‘wallah’ and ‘on God’, pointing them out as ‘hood talk’. I understand these forms of policing as exerting pressure on Shari to conform to certain ideals of Swedish-ness in what Cameron (1995) would call ‘acts of verbal hygiene’. These acts extended beyond an individual user, as they were seen by other users and produced affective movement which passed beyond any individual target or aggressor. In the most intense periods where Shari regularly received racist comments of this kind, her use of ‘immigrant Swedish’ coded words was also conflated with more extreme nationalist stereotypes of immigrants as criminals, as living on social welfare and as uncivilized animals: ‘you [blattar] 2 are destroying Sweden with your crime’ and ‘Go home in a banana box to the country you came from instead of living off our taxes!’. She was frequently targeted by comments concerning her way of writing in her posts: ‘You cnt even write in Swedish, you are making a fool out of yourself’, or less direct comments like ‘Your vocabulary doesn’t seem to be the best today’. However, also when she used less directly immigrant-coded words like ‘whore’ and ‘cunt’ she was called things like ‘ugly’, ‘hood’ and using ‘immi-grant talk’.
Conversely, other comments used the same language ‘come on learn fucking Swedish you cunt!’ She used various tactics to reject these calls on her to improve her Swedish or to abandon immigrant vernacular by, for example, replying ‘Please use blatte Swedish’. Shari responded to Alfons, an ethnically Swedish boy who had heckled her language use for some time, with homophobic slurs and stereotypes, including commenting on his long hair as ‘gay’—even though she had very strongly opposed homophobic values in other instances. In this way, she wielded the stereotype of immigrants with ‘othered’ values in ways that produced resistance against the stereotypes that others were reflecting on her. Shari resisted the pressure to conform by appropriating the racially derogatory term ‘blatte’ by identifying as both immigrant and Swedish, and proclaiming that she will always speak the way she does. This resistance was enabled through entanglements of human and non-human bodies.
Peer support was also pivotal, as well as the particular affordances and circulation of immigrant discourse on the site. When Shari was targeted, her peers (both anonymous and identified) got involved, calling the attackers out on their contradictory and ambiguous way of othering her.
You Swedes are so fucking jealous please all your cars are from Germany, the pizza from Italy, the kebab from turkey, and the oil from Iraq. THEN YOU COMPLAIN THAT YOUR NEIGHBOUR IS AN IMMIGRANT HAIWAN
AHAHAHHAHAHA
But please you brats where does it itch on you if Shari doesn’t speak ‘perfect’ Swedish? Get off her page if you are so bothered by it ÃÃÃÃ - L
HAHAHAHA my love, FUCK them WALLA they won’t be able to change my Swedish anyway
Here, Lina, a white girl, recognized the affective power of ‘immigrant Swedish’, arguing that it would ‘itch’ and ‘bother’ those that were attacking Shari. Shari responded that ‘they won’t be able to change my Swedish anyway’, thus overtly rejecting being schooled (cf. Jonsson, 2007). Anonymous points to the contradictory ways in which Swedish culture adopts material cultural artefacts from other places, all the while immigrants are othered. Shari also responded in a number of ways to the dehumanizing racist attacks through humour, by calling out ‘Swedish-ness’ and rejecting assimilating to its norms (‘they won’t be able to change my Swedish anyway’) while also declaring that she is speaking Swedish, but ‘her’ (my) Swedish. She also gathered support and love from others online such as Anonymous and Lina above, their posts materially counterbalancing the overtly negative posts by her attackers.
As previously exemplified, negative figures such as the immigrant that ‘destroys’ the country or that ‘lives off welfare’ were used to attack, shame and police. But they did not manage to silence Shari and her supporters; rather, these attacks worked to intensify counter-aggressive responses. For Shari, whiteness was not possible, but it was also not desired. Not being docile, by, for example, continuing to use ‘immigrant Swedish’ when being confronted by racist aggression, indicates this as an alternative subjectivity, as a potential line of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Although these instances of racist aggression and racialized policing exuded a strong force on the girls to become docile and to adopt another way of writing, speaking and acting, they were not successful in the case of Shari. Crucial here was the sustained micro-resistance through the use of ‘immigrant Swedish’, the various ways that the peers could express their support through text, emojis, hyperlinks, gifs and other expressions that the site’s technology afforded.
Racialized Aggression and Messy Online Resistance
Racialized aggression may ambulate from the offline to the online, as well as the other way. Through this ambulating movement, resistance works through ambiguous affective flows that move between users and profiles, and draws together a variety of affect, materialities and users. An event that occurred in school sparked a temporary intensification of interaction and circulation of affect on the profiles of the girls involved, as well as their close friends and bystanders. The event in question concerned a fight between two white girls referred to as ‘the blondes’, Alma and Ellie, and a group of three black girls: Bilan, Falis and Salma. Intense discussion ensued online, where anonymous users asked what happened. The event was retold several times on different profiles, each time with differing affective directionality. In other words, what played out in the days that followed the fight was the story of which party was acting out of self-defence and towards what that act of self-defence was directed. The black girls argued that they acted out of self-defence and that Alva and Ellie first called Bilan and Salma, ‘ugly things’ (i.e., racial slurs) and then one of them slapped Bilan and pulled off her hijab.
They called us lots of things and then they slapped me should I just stand still no we did what was right so fuck them her and all the others
Ey to everyone saying that it was 5 against 2 no no no, it was never 5 against 2 it was just me against them. Then Salma came and wanted to drag me away, then they slapped her in the face and called her n*, then Salma went all in and beat them up. (Bilan)
The fight passed from something that happened in school, including a variety of affective intensities, such as verbal racist aggression and physical violence (pulling off Bilan’s headscarf and slapping her in the face). This racially motivated violence produced a mixture of affective responses, including Salma defending herself and her friend.
Swear to god some people are writing about the fight just to get likes man I fuck all of you I don’t even care whose side you’re on but if you say anything about me or my people you are dead?!! I don’t give a shit if we are besties I will fuck up your face!! And also it wasn’t 5 against two it was 2 against 2 but first it was one against two the blondes against Bilan and then it was just me against both of them and I don’t know where [the teacher] came from and I really didn’t see him and I started hitting him and another teacher. (Salma)
Various signs and symbols were entangled in this racialized event (the hijab, the n*word, the slap), producing anger, counter-aggression, a feeling of wanting to withdraw (‘to pull Bilan away’) and a sense of self-defence. The fight drew together pupils and teachers in an intense altercation, with messy contours and reciprocal acts of violence. The conflict then ambulated online. I followed the event as it passed between users, following its affective flow. Interpretation of the school event flowed back and forth was erratic and ambiguous, never resting in either the one or the other version of the story (who won, who lost, who was in the right).
As users opened their application or open the SNS in their web browser, such discussions would have appeared non-structured, as they are not organized neatly but rather occur in the synchronic order they were posted. This makes it difficult to know where the discussion started, in what way and by whom. As the event passed online, it seems that the first site of ambulation occurred through direct messaging and that once it spilled onto the public space of the SNS it had already intensified further. Salma commented that the event had spread quickly online and that she was inundated with messages about it. She wrote that it was garnering peoples’ attention, almost like a news story, describing it as a sort of click-bait. Regardless of whose side people were on, it had become a publicly circulated spectacle. Some asked ‘How did the fight start?’ others criticized their actions claiming that things did not play out the way they claimed ‘“They were begging for a beating” hahaha they were walking AWAY FROM YOU hahhahhah wallah you are lying’. The tone intensified as the discussion progressed such as this anonymous user:
SELF DEFENCE YOU ARE SAYING THAT BILAN JUMPED THEM HAHAHA THAT ISN’T SELF DEFENCE YOU IDIOT THAT IS AN ATTACK, don’t say they lost it YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SAYING THE 4 OF YOU ARE REALLY DUMB
The girls’ peers also got involved in their defence such as Jacinda who wrote:
look at these whores, don’t call her or Salma whores, and those blondes pff they aint nothing, what kind of brats are you say it face2face instead of writing anonymously you little rats!!// Salma’s best JacindaÃ’.
The temporary local virality of the event also entailed the constant pinging of the girls’ phones, which Salma described as ‘incessant’ and ‘annoying’, illustrating her feelings towards the ‘click-baiting’ of such events as ‘disgusting’. However, the ambulation did not only intensify discussions concerning the original event, but also increased the racist online aggression directed towards Bilan, Salma and Falis. Bilan, for instance, received many direct messages and posts on her profile. One of these anonymous posts read, ‘You think you’re cool coz you beat them up don’t you? Just really low sweetheart. Get out of Sweden’. This marked the end of Bilan’s active engagement on the site; after this event, she stopped posting on the platform altogether.
Paasonen (2015) has pointed out how the freedom afforded by discussion boards does not mean it produces democratic debates but indeed may result in the ‘increased polarization of views’ (p. 33). When online exchanges heat up and become ‘animated by a search for affective intensity’, they are characterized by ‘provocation rather than a desire for negotiation’ (p. 33). As affective intensity in this way ‘drives’ online exchanges, in this case it drew in new contributors and provoked aggression, anger, excitement, fear and desire (to click, share and engage). The ambulation not only increased aggression that involved the racialized girls and their identified peers but also seemed to produce stronger ties between these youth as well as to other racialized youth in their vicinity, as they defended each other and articulated allegiance with each other. When asked if he would side with the Swedes a black peer, Ahmid, argued that he sided with ‘his people’ and published a meme depicting a young black child peering at a seemingly lighter skinned and more affluent adult woman (Figure 1). The use of this type of online materiality worked to affectively draw racialized bodies together in this online context. Through the visibility of racialized bodies in images that expressed various feelings, emotions and reactions that worked to signal the posters’ racialized self-identification (in this case Ahmid) as well as those it addressed (in this case Bilan, Falis and Salma).
Ahmid Siding with Bilan, Falis and Salma
This case illustrates how racialized aggression travels in time and space between those involved as well as a larger audience of allies, bystanders and unknown ‘haters’. The flow of affect between users was erratic, ambiguous and messy. However, the event also provided intimacy, support and identification as well as retaliation and counter-aggression. Resistance can thus be understood not as individual acts of contention or rejection, but as affective productions that occur collectively, connecting bodies, ideas and materialities together. Resistance does not necessarily deterritorialize the racialized assemblage, but may enable lines of flight away from the assemblage and produce novel assemblages. How this intensification ambulates is contingent on the platform’s affordances and interface design, but also on how the ambulation affects the users. As racialized aggression ambulates, human bodies become entangled with technology and mediated materialities (memes, links, comments, immigrant vernacular, textual embodiment) which add affective possibilities to the interaction. Ambulation, such as this, is also asynchronic, where the past offline event (what happened in school) is drawn into an ambiguous present that will endure over time as texts, videos, images, memes and links remain on the users’ profiles.
Resistance Against Racialized and Religious Shaming
Shame and disgust were repeatedly articulated both in defence of an attacked peer, to resist racialized practices and directed towards racialized users to criticize their actions. These moments of overt shaming also provided opportunities for users to overtly resist and challenge these practices in intense and collective ways. Racialized shaming was practised not only by white ‘Swedes’ but also by racialized youth. These emotions worked to restrict and police racialized users by drawing on the dualist concepts of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrant or Muslim. Such practices of shaming were also gendered, sexualized and classed—thus affecting targets very differently. Here, a common expression was ‘astukfurullah’ (meaning ‘I seek forgiveness in Allah’), 5 which indicates disapproval and shame in Arabic and within Muslim culture. In this article, these types of shaming practices were primarily directed towards Muslim girls. Muslim boys, on the other hand, openly discussed their ambiguous and contradictory approach to sexual and romantic relationships with Muslim and white girls. The headscarf-wearing Muslim girl was presented as the epitome of a virginal, innocent and respectful girl.
Could you be together with a girl that shows her boobs and dresses like a whore but is still like really sexy or a girl that wears a headscarf and shows respect?
A girl that shows respect wears a headscarf I can’t be with a girl like that because she wears a headscarf and shows respect for Islam, but I also don’t want a girl that dresses like a [qhaba] man and people think too much about their butts and breasts man think about the personality that’s more important.
In this example, the figure of the Muslim girl is territorialized through the affective entanglement of an ambiguous desire for, on the one hand, the virginal respectful Muslim girl (symbolized by the headscarf) and, on the other, the whore and the ‘qhaba’ (illustrated with exposed breasts and sexiness).
One of the girls who were the regular target of this type of shaming was Sadie. She liked boxing, playing video games and described soccer as her ‘life’. She received many anonymous posts arguing that she did not act in accordance to the norms that wearing a headscarf would require. She was called things like ‘cocky’, ‘aggressive’, for ‘[using] ugly words’ and being too sporty. One aggressive comment pointed out, ‘A GIRRRL ACT LIKE A GIRL’ and that the way she acted was not compatible with being a ‘respectful’ Muslim girl but was dragging the headscarf ‘in the dirt’. Following these intense exchanges, other Muslim users criticized Sadie for being a ‘bad Muslim’, calling her a ‘qhaba’ and saying that she was ‘sullying’ the hijab, and that she had to set a ‘good example’. Shaming was often practised under the guise of anonymity rendering the racial and religious identity of the aggressors unclear.
Why are you always so cocky? You wear headscarf and you are a muslim, honestly, a little respect at least, your family are probably religious and you what are you doing? Such a tramp. What do your parents think of you? You are embarrassing […] (Anonymous)
Anonymous comments like this provoked counter-aggressive responses, both by those that were targeted and their peers. Sadie responded, ‘Omg omg AHAHAHA Please walla not again. I am not cocky I am just like this??’, demonstrating that this was not the first time she had been shamed. She also argued that writing anonymously was a shameful practice: ‘I think you should stand up and say your name and not be anonymous’. Although potentially hurtful, racialized aggression, such as the comment above, also produced opportunities for others to support and reject such actions publicly. For instance, one of Sadie’s friends, Jojo, pointed to this type of anonymous post as a practice aimed at intensifying the situation by ‘playing extreme’ and she also saw it as shameful.
FKN motherfucker bro, quit it? You could just as well show some respect? That’s her family their life and you come and have an opinion? If a girl wears a headscarf their like kahpe [qhaba], everyone has problems in their lives? Even you anonymous. Stop playing extreme behind the screen rat get out dirt:) Sweetie try to not get offendedà Jojo
The visibility of such raced and religious forms of aggression thus triggered and intensified exchanges and moments of intense resistance on users’ profile walls. Here, as in other racialized assemblages, shaming was entangled with notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in relation to ideals of appropriate articulations of religion, gender, sexuality and age. These flows between youth seem to entail a reterritorialization of the assemblage and a strengthening of the limiting effects that it has on particularly girls in intersectional ways. This hinged on majoritarian youths’ notions that Muslim girls are in need of liberation from religious oppression by a Muslim ‘other’ (Wagner et al., 2012) and conversely also the notion that Muslim girls need to represent a moderate form of femininity and sexuality.
However, these also sparked instances of contention as users defended, discussed and problematized the shaming practices. These diverse and intersecting forms of reterritorialization can thus, in turn, produce lines of flight that increase girls’ (like Sadie) capacities rather than limit them. In other words, the circulation and intensification of affect and hyper-responsiveness of social media environments (Titley, 2019) may produce inadvertent space for articulation of resistance which may be repeated in such a way as to produce possible new assemblage relations and subjectivities, so it may become possible to be a sporty, video game playing, aggressive, hijab-wearing Muslim girl.
Discussion
The analysis has illustrated the material entanglements and affective production that make up the racialized assemblages of the youth in this article. By studying the relations that these events reveal, it is possible to look at how such racialized assemblages produce certain capacities to do and feel in and among these racialized girls and their peers. The particular human and non-human relations in these assemblages meant that the girls were repeated targets of anonymous and direct forms of racially charged aggression, significantly affecting which capacities—subjectivities and forms of expression—were available to them. These territorializing processes particularly circumscribed their racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual and classed subjectivities in intersectional and differing ways. The online assemblage relations also produced capacities to feel and act as racialized, gendered and classed bodies.
Scholarship on youth resistance tends to understand resistance as contributing to progressive social change, which ties into the idea of resistance as more concerted conscious efforts to resist social domination and the structures that enable them (Johansson & Lalander, 2012; Raby, 2005). Rather than movement mounted against a fixed power, a Deleuzian–Guattarian framework understands resistance as constantly in flux and haphazard (Alldred & Fox, 2017). Such an approach deprivileges human agency, which rather sees resistance as a collective accomplishment and provides a contextual understanding of the relationality involved in opposing racialized aggression on a micro-social level. It also helps us to scrutinize how various human and non-human materialities work together to enable or inhibit successful resistance. The findings of this article point both towards how collective action may start to mount in everyday settings, such as with the case of the ambulating fight, but also how aggression may inhibit girls’ capacities to interact online, as Bilan was not able to continue her active presence on the SNS.
In this article, I have explored resistance as ambiguous and taking place through everyday actions in online spaces. Through that, this article indicates that racism and racialized policing pervades many young social media users’ online worlds, meaning that they constantly have to navigate this precarious ‘othering’. I have also showed how these girls and their peers’ resistance to racialized aggression is messy, ambiguous and not always, ‘righteous and ethically sound’ (Johansson & Lalander, 2012, p. 1087; cf. Raby, 2005). Rather, resistance is intertwined with counter-aggression, anger, frustration, disgust and shame that flow in multiple and ambiguous ways between users, technologies, and across time and space. The analysis further exemplified modalities of online racist expression as well as the hyper-reactivity and collectivity shaped by online affordances which also drive individual and collective acts of counter-racism (Paasonen, 2015; Titley, 2019).
This article also sheds light on a space not often thought of in terms of contested political spaces. Part of the appeal of online spaces for youth is the absence of adults and their supervision (boyd, 2011a). These are important spaces where much of the contemporary social and cultural struggles will play out, often in intense ways. These spaces may be sites of ‘anger, despair and attempts to create liveable and worthy lives’ (Johansson & Lalander, 2012, p. 1084).
My analysis of resistance focused on the assemblage relations, the interactions between both human and non-human ‘agents’ within a social material space where their capacities to act, react, resist, recreate and create are relationally produced. This allows us to ask questions like how platform design and affordances may facilitate racialized aggression. It also allows us to ask questions of how materialities such as hijabs and notions about respectable femininity and ‘immigrant Swedish’ become circulated online and offline in ways that regulate some more than others. This may mean that certain spaces become unbearable for some, but not for others.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.